Alex Jones Is the Cost of Doing Business

Few things have been more cathartic in this long political nightmare than watching Alex Jones get utterly eviscerated on the witness stand. Today we discovered — along with Jones and his attorneys — that the prosecution had obtained every last text message and financial statement from Jones and InfoWars from the last few years.

Oops.

In real time, we could watch (and share and like and comment) as Jones realized the extent of the hole he had dug for himself with every lie, fabrication, and distraction laid bare. Perjury? For sure. Criminal charges? Likely. Damages? Fuck yes.

But it’s not all fun and games and schadenfreude for the left. Because while Jones was pleading poverty, documents show that InfoWars makes as much as $800k per day. Annually, that’s a haul of nearly 300 million dollars. All for the sake of pouring toxic disinformation into the well of public discourse, harassing the living victims of unspeakable tragedies, and hawking fake health supplements with real doomsday kits.

It is one thing for Jones to make a living from this noxious work, and another thing altogether for him to amass a fortune from it. The former is enough on its own — grifters gonna grift — but the latter is the product of a vast right wing funding machine aimed at destroying democracy for fun and profit. 300 million dollars doesn’t happen by accident.

It takes a fraction of a right wing billionaire’s wealth to elevate the likes of Jones, to pay for servers and sets and lighting and advertising, and to push his depraved philosophy onto millions of screens. In return, these billionaires get a conspiratorial cult trained to swallow whatever absurdities they are fed, a shattered polity incapable of consensus on the smallest issues, and a a neat and tidy profit shielded from the imposition of taxes. Win-win-win.

This is why the right wing of US politics is littered with these well-paid charlatans, each churning out a different flavor of the same toxic shit. Some of them sit behind anchor desks and other behind podcast mics, and more still are full time crisis actors like Jones — but all of them are profiting from the same billionaire and millionaire funded ecosystem.

And while there are laws and judges and processes and facts that can eventually fell these beasts of propaganda, there is no counterweight to their influence in the meantime. Liberal rich people aren’t as invested — emotionally or financially — in progressive political priorities.

Even with money to burn and talent aplenty, there is little interest in supporting a left wing media apparatus that could challenge or neutralize disinformation and actively construct consensus for liberal projects. Instead, money gets poured into the same failed centrist vanity campaigns or reputation laundering nonprofits that stall us or park money for a tax break to be claimed later. The few leftists that do get funding and space are often bankrolled by the same GOP donors who make Alex Jones happen — just another vector to achieve the same goals: a splintered politics that can’t agree upon what to do, let alone what tax structure will make it possible.

Alex Jones is probably going to pay through the nose for what he has done, and that is, frankly, fantastic. But he shouldn’t be the only one. His funders should also have to face what they’ve done — and cut us a check.